I Only Moved My Mouse

Hack and slash, tower defense, roguelite, incremental, idle: all moved by one mouse.

• Hack and slash: your cursor is the blade. Every monster it passes through is cut.
  
• Tower defense: wave after wave comes for the crystal at the center. Hold it to the end.
  
• Roguelite: each run deals two weapons beside the one in hand and a fresh draft of awakening cards, and what you keep sends the next run further.
  
• Incremental: shards raise the forge, a melt pays embers for relics, and every number keeps climbing.
  
• Idle: switch on IDLE and the blade, the skills, the signs and the card picks run themselves.

Twenty themes

Twenty places to push through, wave by wave, each with its own monsters. Before a run, the themes page weighs your DPS against what the place needs and shows what it pays.

Level cards

Three picks a level: cut the pack open with the blade and take one card of three, or open ten at once.

Every level pays

Each level pays a skill point for the tree and, from level 40, points for your awakening stats. Between runs, set your starting hand: up to sixteen cards every run opens with, a slot for each boss you beat in the first four themes.

Pacts

Seal pacts to make a run harder for more shards and embers: a shorter clock, a crystal of glass, three more elites every wave.

A skin for every theme

Clear a theme's wave 40 and its skin is yours: every page, the cursor and the crystal in that theme's light. Wear it whole, or one part at a time.

What resets, what stays

Progress builds in three layers: one starts over every run, one at every melt, and one never.

Each run starts fresh. You draft awakening cards from scratch again, one from three at a time, up to ninety-nine in a run, and the weapons that come into the two empty sockets climb from LV 1 again. When the crystal breaks, your hand of cards is gone, but nothing you picked up is lost: shards go to the bank, gear to your bag, and the experience is already yours, so even a run that broke early leaves you stronger.

Each melt starts the forge over. Between runs your banked shards buy upgrades along the forge's seven rows and raise the sword's tier from Chipped Iron to Godsteel; when the climb slows, melt the sword. Its tier goes back to one and the forge and the bank empty, but the melt pays embers: the further your runs reached and the higher the sword stood, the more. Embers buy relics rank by rank, and the ranks stay. Right after a melt, before your next run or forge purchase, you may also hand relics back for every ember they cost and spend them another way.

Everything else is yours for good. No melt takes:

• your level, and every skill point it paid
  
• your skill tree: 28 nodes holding nine player skills
  
• your signs, five shapes drawn with the blade
  
• your level cards, sixty in all: three picks every level, and each card you pick again climbs a rank, up to rank 30
  
• your relics, and every rank you bought
  
• your gear: sixteen slots, seven rarities, eighteen uniques
  
• every weapon you have won, thirty-nine beside the sword
  
• every theme you have opened, twenty in all

So a melt is never a loss: it trades the sword's tier for relics that never leave, the next climb is faster than the last, and what stays only grows with every run.